hold your breath let it go
by guiltylights
Summary: Miyazano Kaori dies, and this how they cope. – Kousei, Tsubaki, Watari. After-canon.


_**[Time started: Sept 21 2015, 1.37am; –]**_

 **Arima Kousei is my son and the light of my life fI G HT ME on this.**

 **At the time of starting this I just finished episode 13 and LET ME TELL YOU I was in tears oh god Kousei.**

 **So here, have this thingamajig.**

 **Please rate and review!**

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 **Title:** hold your breath; let it go

 **Summary:** Miyazano Kaori dies, and this how they cope. – Kousei, Tsubaki, Watari. After-canon.

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For Watari and Tsubaki, Kaori's and Kousei's competition was the beginning of the end.

If Tsubaki closes her eyes, she can still see the scene in front of her: the sleek dark shine of the piano glinting under the golden stage lights, Kaori in flowing cotton-white – along with Kousei, in a blue suit, the both of them playing desperately, struggling, valiantly. Tsubaki can see Kaori and Kousei together, supporting, helping, shining so brilliantly on the stage – and so, so far away. Tsubaki stretches out her fingers, stretches and stretches, but for some reason, they are never quite in reach.

For Watari, this is how it goes: as he watches Kaori and Kousei steal the limelight and everybody's breaths away, he begins to fall. And for Watari – he doesn't realise it yet, but there had always been some sort of brilliance to what you could never, ever have.

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Spring came, even after Miyazono Kaori's death.

Tsubaki almost expects it not to – because spring was so Kaori, spring was so indisputably Kaori-chan that Tsubaki almost believed that when she died, Kaori took the whole of spring with her. But spring came, anyway; the sakura trees blossomed, soft pink flowers that swayed in the wind and filled the sky with endless bursting of blooms unfurling in the sunlight.

The sight was a little beautiful. The sight was a little lonely.

And Kousei was the most melancholy under the sight of them all – solemn face upturned towards the branches swaying heavy with the flowers, eyes deep with a meaning that Tsubaki thinks only Kousei himself could understand. She counts the flower petals that skip around his face – one, two, five, she lost count around eight – and quietly, breathes.

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School resumes in their lives like nothing had ever happened. They attend the same old classes, with the same old subjects, and go home on the same old route with the occasional stops to the nearby convenience store, just like always. Their friendship remains the same too: the same careless banter, the same bickering, the same constant abuse on the physically fragile Kousei by the two athletes – everything was the same as usual.

Except that more often then not, Tsubaki or Watari would catch Kousei gazing distantly off to the side, before snapping back and resuming the conversation. Sometimes, there are lulls in conversation that was a bit more awkward than comfortable, trailing offs that hung unspoken in the air. In the spaces of the silence that followed Tsubaki could almost hear what all of them were thinking: _what would Kaori do now?_

But that was only sometimes, and things were mostly normal, really.

And Kousei still plays the piano: he plays. He plays in the school music room during his free periods, Chopin nocturnes and Bach pieces that Tsubaki can hear echo through the school alongside the sound of her batting. And when they leave school, Kousei goes home and plays the piano there too: maybe teaching, maybe practicing, and his music floats through the air long after the sky has gone dark and silent and when the whole world was asleep.

(Doesn't this boy ever need to study. What even.)

Alongside the normal diligence that came with his practice, the usual precision, Tsubaki sometimes thinks she can hear something else. Melancholy, perhaps. Nostalgia.

Often, it lulls her to sleep.

And today was no different; it was afternoon, and it was hot, and Tsubaki sticks a sweaty head into the music room to see Kousei at the piano as always, playing something that she couldn't recognise.

Kousei notices her, and stops playing. "Tsubaki!" He smiles.

Tsubaki leans forward from the window into the room, and grins back as wide as the whole sun. "Yo! Practicing hard, huh?"

Kousei starts shuffling the papers on the piano together; the sound drifted around them for a one short, lazy moment. "Yeah. This really difficult Rachmaninoff piece; it's killing me."

"Rach-rachmanloff?"

Kousei laughs at the confusion on Tsubaki's face. "He was a Russian composer."

Tsubaki tch-ed. "Whatever. Hey, hey! Did you see me score that homerun just now? It was totally awesome, if I do say so myself – my years here haven't been wasted after all!" Tsubaki thumped her chest proudly.

Before Kousei could reply, "careful, they say girls who do that often end up being flat-chested for life," came a lazy drawl, and Tsubaki and Kousei both turned their heads to see Watari lazily propped up on the other window ledge, chest slightly heaving from football practice. "Though honestly, Tsubaki, you were never really that chested to begin with." Watari side-eyes Tsubaki.

With an indignant squawk, Tsubaki turned away from Watari and automatically hugged her chest. "Pervert! What are you staring at!"

Watari snorts. "Oh please, I'm not staring at _you."_

"What's that supposed to mean?!"

Kousei laughs.

Watari and Tsubaki both shut up simultaneously, when they heard it; they haven't hear Kousei laugh like this, in a while, full-bellied and honest- _happy_ in a way that meant that the laughter that was out of nothing else but joy and amusement. Unconsciously, Tsubaki felt her lips curve up into a smile, and she gazes at Kousei laughing with fond eyes.

At the side, Watari gazes at her knowingly, and Tsubaki flushes, and doesn't look his way.

But abruptly as it came, Kousei stopped laughing, and Tsubaki and Watari both saw a sudden flash of longing that came across his features before he hid it away. Tsubaki's heart clenched: Kousei wished that Kaori was here. Tsubaki glances at Watari, and saw that he was the same too, and Tsubaki suddenly feels the urge to cry.

But Tsubaki presses it down, shoves the pain away into the deep recesses of her heart, and locks it up: she doesn't need to grieve, here. Tsubaki doesn't need to grieve.

(Sometimes Tsubaki wonders when did she get so good at lying to herself, like this.)

The wind breezes through the open window, across the silent piano room, gentle, quiet.

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It's during one of their walks home that Tsubaki blurts it out.

"Do you miss her, Kousei?"

Almost instantaneously Tsubaki wished she could slap the air and take the words back: but they hung in the air, heavy, silent, weighing on their backs. Kousei had fallen silent; his steps slowed. Unconsciously, Tsubaki's did too: it was just him and her today, Watari had soccer practice today and was going to run late.

Tsubaki can't remember the last time they'd been alone, like this. Actually, no, that was a lie, Tsubaki remembered only all too well: the last time they had been alone together had been a rainy day, under the shelter of a shop, with her mouth tasting of lemonade and with a black cat hovering unseen behind their legs. That day Tsubaki told Kousei that she loved him wasn't a day she was going to forget any time soon.

And even now, staring at Kousei from across the road months after she had told him so and after Kousei's light had died and gone out, Tsubaki knows, that she still loves him, and that it isn't going to stop.

Tsubaki _knows._

Kousei answering smile was a painful thing to look at it, cracked in all the places he tried to reassure and grief hiding in the varnish. "Yeah. Yeah, I do."

After a long painful silence, Tsubaki kicks him. "Hmph!" Kousei's answering yell of pain was _extremely_ satisfying.

And later, when Tsubaki is at home alone in her room she draws her knees up to her chest and slides down shaking on the floor, because it isn't fair, it isn't _fair._ Tsubaki loved Kousei, but Tsubaki loved Kaori-chan too: Kaori-chan was her friend, she'd known her first before Watari or even Kousei did, and something like this felt almost like having to choose between Kousei and Kaori, and she couldn't _choose,_ she could _never_ choose.

Sometimes Tsubaki wishes she was Kaori; _sometimes._

But that longing passed as quickly as it came, and Tsubaki sits on her bedroom floor, and does not cry.

Outside, Kousei's piano starts playing, and it sounds much sadder than usual.

It doesn't stop until very late at night.

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"Yo."

Kousei looks up to see Watari walking towards him, a carton of Moo milk in hand. "Hey, Watari."

Kousei tosses the milk at Kousei. "Here, for you. God knows you don't leave this music room at all, so I thought I'd bring you something."

Kousei barely managed to catch it; he doesn't an athlete's reflexes, after all, not like Watari, but he manages. "Thanks."

Watari watches Kousei drink the milk quietly; he's crouched on the floor, Watari, gazing at Kousei with unfathomable eyes.

There's something bubbling, in the subtext, between them; Watari doesn't know exactly what is yet, but he knows it, and he knows it's there.

So Watari gazes at Kousei with unfathomable eyes, and watches him finish drinking his milk.

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It comes quietly on the exhale, on a muggy Wednesday afternoon, where Tsubaki and Watari are both lying on the floor of the music room with wont of nothing else to do. Kousei wasn't there. They didn't have a reason to be in the music room in the first place. But still, they went – because it was a familiar thing, in the midst of the quiet grief that has been happening lately.

It clicks quietly in Watari's mind, and he breathes out silently before he speaks. "Kaori was in love with Kousei, huh."

The words hung in the air, gentle like a dissipating flower on the breeze. There was no bite to it, no accusation: just a simple, calm acceptance. The feelings of anger died out ages ago, and Watari isn't sure if he could bring it back anymore.

Tsubaki closes her eyes and waits a beat to speak. "Yeah."

From where she was, she could see the blue sky through the glass of the window – a patch of it still broken, from so many months ago – and she reaches out her hands towards it, closes her fist once, twice, and lets go.

"Yeah."

Watari exhales again. "Oh."

Tsubaki stares at her outstretched fingers. Silhouetted by the glaring sun, she could almost pretend, almost, that they were musician's fingers. That the callouses on her fingertips were from hours of pressing them down on worn strings or worn keys, not from pitching for the perfect home run strike after strike after strike. That the thick skin between her forefinger and thumb was from having to hold the neck of a violin right, and not from the scratchiness of a well-rounded baseball in her hand. Maybe if she had played music, instead: how would things have changed?

Except that Tsubaki knew that even if she had played music, she wouldn't have been able to do what Kaori Miyazono ever did. Her relationship with Kousei ran different from that. She wouldn't have been able to pull him out of it. Tsubaki knew it, and lets her hand fall.

Tsubaki feels the grief pull quietly at the corners of her mind, and doesn't bother trying to fight it.

Another exhale. "Weird," Watari says out loud, his voice still relaxed, his voice still easygoing – but by now Tsubaki had known him for too long to not know any better, "I feel like I should be angry, or something. She used me, in a way, didn't she?" A quiet laugh, and Tsubaki feels it disappear into the air. "But I don't. How messed up is that?"

"You always end up forgiving even the most selfish actions in the people you love." Tsubaki quietly answers.

Watari went silent for so long, Tsubaki almost wondered if he had gone to sleep. She twists her head to the side to check. And there was Watari, hazel eyes focused on the ceiling, facial features calm and relaxed. "Love, huh? Was that what it was."

"I don't know, Watari, you tell me." Tsubaki turns her head back to the ceiling, and stares upward.

"Maybe. Sort of."

And Tsubaki knows that Watari will cry. Later in the privacy of his own time he will howl, he will scream, he will cry tears of anger and of grief and of everything in between, but that was all part of the mourning. Watari will hate Kaori, a little, for using him. And Tsubaki doesn't hold him against that.

It's never easy, pinning down the feelings for someone who died. Except for Kousei, perhaps, but still Tsubaki wasn't so sure. And Miyazano Kaori was dead, and time moves on, and Tsubaki's not sure how they ever will. And in between her death and now there was a million different things that needed to be addressed, lots of things that needed its own space to grieve, its own space to overcome. Tsubaki isn't sure when they'll ever be finished.

But she thinks that they were grieving just as much as they needed to.

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 **I feel like being any one of the characters right now would suck so bad, but for some reason I have a soft spot for Tsubaki when it comes to writing it. Idk, I'm weird. They're all my children.**

 **I'm finishing this after I've finished the anime for a while. I found the ending a little… anti-climactic, really. I think I just expected myself to cry, but I didn't. Maybe it's because I've read the manga, and I already knew what was coming.**

 **Whelp this went in directions I did not expect.**

 **Please rate and review! :)**

 _ **[Time completed: Nov 19 2015, 5.53pm; –]**_


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